Inconceivable (3 page)

During our engagement, Sean’s dad was diagnosed with an aggressive form of leukemia. He died three months before our wedding, and it seemed as though the whole town went into mourning. John Savage’s death was front-page news for three days. There must have been a hundred cars in the procession behind the hearse, which paused briefly in front of John F. Savage Hall, the University of Toledo’s beautiful basketball arena that had been named in his honor, a testament to his kind spirit, generosity, and skills as a fund-raiser. The seven Savage sons, including Sean, served as pallbearers.

In big Irish families, life is always moving on, despite the sorrows. The year John Savage died, we were married and a Savage baby boom was under way. We already had nieces Kristen and Meredith, and five more babies were due the year of our wedding. I hoped I’d soon be joining their number, but we weren’t certain, as I was already suffering some fertility problems. Doctors had diagnosed my endometriosis when I was a teenager, and I underwent an operation to remove scar tissue caused by that condition while I was in college. Before Sean and I married, my doctor told us that, if we wanted children, we would have to start right away. We took him seriously, and I was proud to be five months pregnant on our first anniversary.

Drew’s conception came the old-fashioned way, and his birth went perfectly. We had beaten the predicted—almost promised—problems of infertility. If I had known what was to come, I would have memorized every moment of the day Drew was born. We tried right away for a second child, but it would never again be that easy.

Our infertility treatments began with the most benign techniques: charting basal body temperatures to predict ovulation and trying like hell to conceive at times not at all inspired by romance. I’m pretty sure that our second son was conceived on a Sunday night during an episode of
Murder She Wrote
after an ovulation stimulation shot. Not the most romantic of conceptions, but it worked.

My second pregnancy progressed smoothly until ten weeks
before my due date. Late one night I felt woozy and was experiencing increasing abdominal pain. Sean rushed me to the hospital. My blood pressure had soared to 160/100, and they admitted me, suspecting preeclampsia, a dangerous condition of pregnancy when the mom’s blood pressure spikes and the placenta starts to break down. Early the next morning my obstetrician diagnosed HELLP syndrome, a rare and extremely deadly form of preeclampsia. The only way to save my life and our baby’s life was an emergency C-section. I delivered our second son at 10:30 that evening. He was under-weight and admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). I spent the next ten days in the hospital recovering. A month later, Ryan arrived home to meet his big brother—our well-earned happy ending—at a whopping three pounds, fifteen ounces.

After Ryan was born, all the physicians we consulted agreed that HELLP syndrome was unlikely to happen again, and we were clear to try for another child. During the next ten years I underwent an enormous number of treatments. Every now and then we would ask if in vitro fertilization was something we should explore, but our doctors always said that we didn’t need that kind of technology. My ovaries responded well, and Sean’s sperm were Olympic swimmers.

So what was the problem? Could it be stress? We thought so from time to time. For several years, as we raised our two active sons, I pursued a graduate degree with the goal of advancing from classroom teaching to a position as a principal. Sean was spending long hours building his financial services business. We found ourselves questioning whether we should keep trying for another child.

In 2005 I was working as a principal, and we were seven years into our quest for a third child. With our busy schedules, miscommunication was a constant problem. Something had to give.

One night I had a school board meeting that Sean had known about for weeks. I was just entering the meeting when my cell phone rang. I answered it.

“Hi, Carolyn. It’s Geoff Aughenbaugh. I’m at cross-country practice, and it seems Sean left early and forgot something.”

Sean coached Drew’s cross-country team, and he always left early on Monday evenings to get to Ryan’s soccer practice, where he was also the head coach. “Yeah, Geoff, listen. Can you just put whatever he left in your car and bring it to practice with you tomorrow?”

“Uh, not really. He left Drew!” In years past, Drew had accompanied Sean and Ryan to soccer practice, but that year he was old enough to stay home alone. I thought Sean would arrange a ride home for Drew, but with our frantic schedules, both of us had forgotten to make sure that one of us would do that.

I was livid with Sean, and as it turned out, he was just as frustrated with me. That night, before bed, we started blaming each other, and I ended up locking myself in the bathroom in tears.

As I stood there looking at my tired, anxious face in the mirror, I recalled that there’d been a few too many incidents like this recently—too many for my comfort anyway. The week before, when I was driving the boys to school, I was so worried about a morning meeting that I forgot to drop them off. I drove a few miles past their school when Drew said, “Mom, where are you going?” By the time I turned around, delivered them to school, and fought the traffic to my job, I was late. And the week before that another mom had asked me how I balanced the boys’ school lunches nutritionally. I confessed that I didn’t pack their lunches. She looked at me as if I was the world’s worst mother. Her reaction was extreme, and it was none of her business, but she’d made me feel guilty. The truth was that I would have loved to have the time to make their lunches, to know during the day that they were eating something I’d chosen for them, something that would not only sustain them but allow me to touch them in some way at their midday meal. A small thing, but it mattered to me.

When I walked out of the bathroom, Sean was waiting. He said
what I’d been thinking for weeks: “You know, you don’t have to work. We can manage.”

I wanted to slow down. I longed to enjoy our family. But it was hard to fathom walking away from being a principal. I’d worked so hard to get that job.

Once again, Sean said just what I needed to hear: “You could always try quitting, and if you miss it too much, you can go back.”

Right then and there, I decided to give it a try. At the end of the school year, I resigned from my position to start my new job as a stay-at-home mom, pledging to myself that I’d pick up my career at some later date. It also wasn’t far from my thoughts that without the added stress of two careers, we just might be blessed with another child.

That fall, we headed back to our doctor to try for a third child in earnest. After three more unsuccessful ovulation stimulation cycles, we were verging on hopelessness. By the time we made an appointment to discuss whether there was anything else we could do, we were exhausted. When I thought about being pregnant, I felt like a failure. Prior to the unsuccessful stimulation cycles, I’d had two miscarriages in which the babies died before they even had a heartbeat. We needed something more.

“The techniques we’re trying aren’t working,” I told our fertility doctor. “I make tons of eggs. You said Sean’s sperm is fine. Why aren’t we pregnant?”

“I don’t have an explanation for this. The only remaining option we have left is in vitro fertilization. But clinically, you shouldn’t need it.”

“Well, obviously we need something more than what we’re doing,” I said.

“I’m not sure I really understand IVF,” Sean said.

“You’re familiar with the first part of it, as it starts out the way we’ve started before. Carolyn would take medications to stimulate her ovaries to produce eggs. When her eggs are mature enough, I
will surgically remove them and use your sperm to fertilize them in the lab. Then we wait. We watch the embryos every day to see how well they are growing. Between three and five days later, we transfer one, two, or three of the embryos back into Carolyn’s uterus.”

“How do we decide how many to transfer?” Sean asked.

“I determine the quality of the embryos, and we talk it over. If the embryos are growing well, I would never transfer more than two. If the embryos are of lesser quality, we might transfer three. What we don’t want is you carrying three or four babies.”

“After the transfer, we wait two weeks before the pregnancy test,” I said.

“That’s right. We hope by that time at least one of the embryos has implanted in your uterus and begun to grow.”

“Isn’t this very expensive? Our insurance doesn’t cover the procedure,” Sean asked.

“After medications, office visits, and surgical procedures, it will run you around $8,000 per try.”

The blood nearly ran out of Sean’s face. That was a lot of money, especially considering we had already spent a small fortune over the course of the previous decade on medications for our ovulation stimulation cycles.

The money wasn’t the only aspect of IVF that made us think carefully before proceeding. After we left the doctor’s office, we had to seriously consider what our Church said about our options. Before we entered the world of infertility, I hadn’t thought much about the Catholic Church’s stand on this issue; I understood the Church’s condemnation of anything that takes procreation out of the intimate relationship between a man and a woman, but I had hoped that IVF was an issue I would never have to grapple with. After all, we were a strong Catholic family, and our choices about how to spend our time and raise our children had always been consistent with our religious beliefs. In addition, I had worked my entire career in Catholic schools, and Sean was raised in a devout Catholic
family. Our boys attended a Catholic school, and nearly all of our friends were people we knew from church or school. Considering how we lived our lives, we couldn’t lightly dismiss church doctrine on the subject.

Yet after examining the Church’s opposition to assisted reproductive technology, we found that stance discriminatory. The Church is definitely pro-family. IVF helps committed couples build the families they so desire. What could be immoral about that? If we followed its underlying logic, the church doctrine was in essence saying that God wanted to deny us a larger family simply because I had a disease (endometriosis). That seemed ridiculous to us. My eggs fertilized fine; they just couldn’t navigate their way through the fallopian tubes to implant in my womb. IVF allows embryos to go directly to the uterus. Miraculous technology. God-given technology, we believed.

To us, it seemed like the Church might eventually accept this technology and all the love and joy it brings to couples who want so desperately to bring more Catholic children into the world. Also, it was clear to us that other families in our parish had wrestled with this issue and decided that they did not agree with the Church’s opinion about assisted reproductive technology either. Our boys’ Catholic grade school was full of fraternal twins and triplets!

After going back and forth on the issue many times, we finally decided to try IVF. We had no intention of ever challenging the Church regarding its stance on it. We just decided to move quietly onward. If God wanted to take it up with us later, we decided, then so be it.

Our doctor was so gracious and understanding as we struggled with this issue, as well as with the questions that remained after we made our decision. Of all the professionals we encountered on our long quest to have more children, our first fertility doctor was among the kindest and most patient, and we are grateful to him for his generosity. He sat for hours with us answering every question
we had in painstaking detail. I never left an appointment with him feeling that he thought our questions were ignorant or that he’d become impatient with our inability to decide. Instead, with his gentle, kindly face and honest blue eyes, he gave us the feeling that everything we asked was reasonable and that he would respect our wishes.

Once we decided to consider IVF, we asked for an appointment to discuss how to ensure that the procedure would be conducted in a way that fit our values. “How many embryos could we create in an in vitro cycle?” Sean asked our doctor.

“Successful cycles yield around twelve to fifteen embryos.”

We looked at each other. That seemed like a lot!

“Are all of those embryos potential lives?” Sean asked.

“No. Not every embryo develops. Some fail to thrive naturally. We would hope that you would have a nice batch of healthy embryos to choose from at the time of transfer.”

“What happens to the embryos that are alive but we don’t transfer?”

“They can be cryopreserved, donated, or discarded,” the doctor said.

“Well, we certainly can’t discard them. And I can’t imagine donating them to another family. They are our potential children,” Sean said, and I nodded vigorously.

“We’ll just transfer every last one of them, until there aren’t any more left,” I suggested.

So it was settled. We’d go forward with IVF, and if I did become pregnant with that first fresh transfer, we would bank the frozen embryos, hoping they might result in more children at a later date. One way or another, we’d make sure that all our embryos had a chance at life.

When, in August 2006, we found out I was pregnant after our first IVF transfer, we told no one. My new ob-gyn, Dr. Elizabeth Read, suspected I had blood-clotting problems that had probably
contributed to our troubles conceiving and the two miscarriages I’d had. We wanted to make sure the pregnancy was viable before we broke the news. She ordered tests to confirm her suspicions. We were so hopeful. With the pregnancy and Dr. Read’s new theory, we felt as though at last we’d figured it out.

At Thanksgiving that year we wrapped up an ultrasound picture and gave it to my parents just before dinner. It took them a minute, but when they finally realized what it was, my mom burst into tears of joy. Our boys, then ages twelve and nine, were ecstatic to have another child in the family.

At my twelve-week doctor’s appointment to get my blood test results, Dr. Read ordered an ultrasound. I watched the screen eagerly. I saw our baby’s arms, legs, and head, and I searched for the familiar flutter of the heartbeat. I saw no movement of any kind. I thought maybe I was looking at a still image, until the technician hastily switched off the monitor and yelled for Dr. Read.